“For Weeks After the Funeral” by Andrea Hollander Budy

Credit: Wikipedia

When you lose someone beloved to you, the earth can feel like it shatters into a million shards of glass, while time and life also stands frozen. Grief crashes over you like choppy waves. One minute, you feel like your life will eventually get back on track even though your heart will always miss your lost beloved. The next, you cannot imagine how your life can continue without your lost beloved and how anything will ever seem joyful and satisfying now that he or she is no longer there to enjoy milestones—and even the mundane moments—with you.

That “hushed” atmosphere represents how huge the absence of a beloved person who has died can feel, even when he or she has been gone for weeks.

Andrea Hollander Budy
(credit: figuresofspeechpdx.wordpress.com)

Andrea Hollander Budy’s poem, “For Weeks After the Funeral,” paints a beautiful picture of the fine line between acute and complicated grief with her simile of what a family’s house feels like, not just right after a funeral, but how it can feel “for weeks.” She compares it to “the opera,/the audience in their seats, hushed, ready,/but the cast not yet arrived.” That “hushed” atmosphere represents how huge the absence of a beloved person who has died can feel, even when he or she has been gone for weeks.

The following stanza shows how difficult it is for the speaker if she “said anything/to try to appease the anxious air, my words/would hang alone like the single chandelier.” That “chandelier” represents the lasting effects grief can have on the lost beloved’s survivors. It will continue to shine brightly until those grieving are able to accept the loss of the beloved for what it is and begin to learn to live again, rather than hanging on to the past and being unable to move past how much the loss constantly lingers in the shadows. The chandelier symbolizes that fine line between those experiencing acute grief and the others whose grief may become complicated and eventually prevent them from believing that life can actually move on without that important person.

This demonstrates that the loss of someone beloved can hang over the heads of those grieving for a long time and that oftentimes words—no matter how well-intentioned they may be—will not suffice in easing the powerful grip that sadness and intense longing can have on people who are deeply grieving.

Hollander Budy concludes her description of the chandelier by saying “waiting to dim the auditorium, but still/too huge, too prominent, too bright, its light/announcing only itself, bringing more/emptiness into the emptiness.” This demonstrates that the loss of someone beloved can hang over the heads of those grieving for a long time and that oftentimes words—no matter how well-intentioned they may be—will not suffice in easing the powerful grip that sadness and intense longing can have on people who are deeply grieving. Those words just fill the empty air in the space of the person lost, hence “bringing more/emptiness into the emptiness.”

In “For Weeks After the Funeral,” Hollander Budy cleverly captures how although we all grieve when we lose someone we love so dearly. Our personal journeys of dealing with grief are not always as straightforward as crying one day and then suddenly waking up the next day ready to move forward. Grief can wrap itself around some people and suffocate their desires and abilities to continue living their lives without the lost beloveds they were used to sharing both the good and bad with all the time.

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